I also started digiscrapping before there were templates, and I had to start by learning about page design. If you don't already know about them, learning about design principles like visual triangles, visual weight, and symmetric and asymmetric balance helps you look at or imagine a page and understand why it does (or doesn't!) work. You can find lots of tutorials online about scrapbook page design, if that sounds like something you'd find helpful. Some people with more artistic brains than mine seem to just "get" all of that, but I had to explicitly learn it.
After years of scrapping almost exclusively with templates, I'm starting to do more pages from scratch. I've scrapped for long enough that I kind of have a library of page design ideas in my head. Not exact copies of pages I've seen, but more like a mental list of 10 go-to paper arrangements, another 10 photo arrangements, etc. When I get stuck I do like others have suggested; I browse the gallery, find websites or print graphic design ideas that inspire me, or even look through my templates and then mix and match ideas from multiple sources.
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